


These Hearts Of Stone

by MiaChia123



Category: Gears of War (Video Games)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Budding Love, Developing Relationship, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, OTP Feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-28
Updated: 2020-09-27
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:13:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26690452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MiaChia123/pseuds/MiaChia123
Summary: "In their world, where monsters dwelt and loss was guaranteed, love was the only word to use when describing a relationship in which you were ready to die for another human being. And he'd been ready to die for Sam since day one."Post Gears of War 3
Relationships: Damon Baird/Samantha "Sam" Byrne
Comments: 2
Kudos: 12





	1. Her

The world had been ending for sixteen years before this night. A part of her world has ended, just hours ago. The loss of Dominic Santiago had been mostly ignored in the face of surviving. Now, when the planet is quiet and there are no more distractions, Samantha Byrne begins to grieve.

Any attempt to settle in a room for the night has been met with utter resistance. Her body, apparently, refuses to shut down in someone else’s bed, among the facts and habits of someone else’s life. They are dead now, whoever the person occupying room 568 had been, and the small personal effects she’s found scattered about--a pipe, a music box, and a journal she doesn’t dare to open--will never be enough to piece them back together. 

Besides, missing sleep is nothing new. She imagines it will take years, if ever, for her to relearn the mysteries of true and restful sleep. 

So she is wandering the hotel. She contemplates visiting the roof, if only to have a destination, if only to stop roaming the halls like some kind of ghost. She isn’t dead. She hasn’t died. 

Dom has died, and just thinking about seeing those pulsing blue waves again is enough to dismiss the roof idea from her head. Too little, too fucking late.

A sob bounces up from her chest, as unexpected as the tears that suddenly fill her eyes. She covers her mouth like she is going to be sick. She feels like she is going to be sick.

No, the world hasn’t ended. But, standing very still as she cries, Samantha Byrne wonders if maybe it should have after all.

***

She finds him hours later, after stumbling upon the ground floor library. 

Growing up, Sam had never owned books. She used to tell herself that it was a lack of interest, or a lack of concentration, or some combination of both. She was a tomboy, and if her freetime wasn’t spent out of doors, then it was wasted.

But the real explanation, looking back, is as simple as it is embarrassing: she had been poor.

There was no room for escapism where Samantha Byrne came from. And if her free time was spent outdoors, that’s only because “freetime” was what she called it to be sent on errands. Gathering kindling for the stove, or bringing water back from the stream, or any other outside chore was easy to imagine as recess when time spent inside the house was, more often than not, hell. 

_The lights are out again, and the taps have run dry. Mom is out of work again, and she’s coughing and she’s tired. There is nothing to eat again. There is no heat again. There are rats--fucking rats--nesting in the basement, again._

And so if little Samantha had been sent into town with instructions to buy something-- _anything_ \--to eat, it was an unspoken rule that anything did not include paperback novels. Yes, books were edible. She’d seen families stripping apart fantasy worlds for the glue that bound them together, protein in its barest form. Sam hadn’t been that desperate.

But she’d been curious. She would walk into town, gripping loose change so tightly as to leave marks on her palm, and scan the vendor stalls. She was there to buy food, but looking didn’t cost a cent. And if someone was hocking old paperbacks, bloated from water damage and speckled with mold, she’d look. She’d look, and she’d imagine the stories hidden within those pages. She’d think about buying one, and walking into the woods behind her house, and devouring that book without tasting a single bit of it.

And then she’d remember herself, and she’d remember her mom, and she’d buy food instead. 

Books had no place in her life. If she wanted action, she could bring a club down to the basement and sort out their infestation. If she wanted romance, she could sell love like some of the other girls in town did, not that she ever wanted to, not that she ever would. If she wanted horror, she could go into her mother’s sickroom, and listen to what death sounded like as it left Sheraya Byrne in brutal coughing fits. If she wanted adventure, she could join the army, which, in the end, is exactly what she did.

Now, in the library, books are scattered everywhere, and no one is stripping them for glue. Sam is shocked to see dozens of them strewn across the floor, discarded by those who used to live here with complete indifference. Those people couldn’t have known about Sam, or about the books she never got to read as a child. Their ignorance, and their privilege, feels like a smack across her face either way.

Without another thought, she’s picking up books, and then she’s holding back tears. It’s irrational, to cry over a few misplaced novels and textbooks, but the strain of the day is wearing on her. She cries for the books, because that’s better than crying over Dom.

“I’ll just stay here all fucking night,” she tells herself, a proclamation as unexpected as the tears. She thinks that she is alone, and alone is suddenly all she wants to be. Just her and her books.

So when Damon Baird calls down, begging whoever that is to please shut the fuck up, she is startled, and she is pissed. She spots him on the open second floor, and his back is to her. She looks at him, and she decides he is the perfect person to scream at, and cry at, and maybe even strike at. It is an illogical, baseless series of thoughts, but in that moment, Sam’s grief is a hurricane. Baird is simply in the eye of it.

She wipes her eyes and drops the books. She stomps across the room, and she climbs the spiraling iron staircase that leads to the second floor as loudly as she possibly can.

She opens her mouth to say something mean and unforgivable. He turns to see who it is.

And then they both just stare.

The anger leaves Sam as quickly as it showed up. She looks at Damon Baird. The skin around his eyes is swollen and so deeply red as to be almost purple. He looks beat up. He looks sick.

“Are you okay?” he asks, and that’s when Sam realizes she might look just as poorly.

“Yes,” she lies, shoving nervous hands into deep pockets. She remembers that she’s supposed to be mad at him. She clears her throat. “I was, until you were fucking rude to me.”

“Yeah, sorry about that,” Baird replies, but whatever magic has been holding their gaze suddenly dissolves, and he turns back in his chair. 

Sam stands in the dimness, not sure what else to do. She isn’t alone anymore, and suddenly, she doesn’t want to be alone again. 

“You can sit,” Baird says, reading her thoughts or else thinking them himself. She lets go of a breath without realizing she’s been holding it. 

Baird is hunched over a book. Without being obvious, Sam tries to make out the contents, but the room is somber, and Baird casts a long shadow. She studies him instead.

She expects the weariness. She expects the angry red burns that litter his arms in patches, evidence of Queen Myrrah and her Tempest.

She does not expect to see his true face, the one he ordinarily keeps so well hidden. It is a face of desperate unhappiness. Up close, she can see how his eyes and lips look like something barely rescued from drowning.

“Are you alright?” she asks quietly, as gently as she’s ever spoken to Damon Baird, or maybe anyone.

His shoulders hunch. He looks at her, and the mask is back on. 

“I’m great, Sam,” he snaps. “I love being interrupted when I’m in the middle of something.”

Sam recoils a little, and Baird turns back to his book. She keeps staring at him, confused, discouraged. Suddenly angry again. 

“What are you reading?” she presses. She’s learned that satisfaction comes from poking Baird between the bars of his cage, which is to say provoking him.

She can be mean, too. 

He looks at her, and again, she sees that wounded thing behind his eyes. It flashes briefly. It dies as he shakes his head.

“It doesn’t fucking matter what I’m reading, Byrne,” he mutters. He flips two pages in quick succession, and then, after scanning them, slams the cover shut. He gets up. He walks over to the balustrade and sends the book flying. It lands on the ground floor with an audible snap, and that’s when Sam realizes that the previous tenants of the hotel hadn’t been the ones to make such a mess.

“That’s real fucking mature, Baird.” She pushes herself up, feeling rage all over again. Their shoulders brush as she heads for the stairs, and she slams hers into his purposefully.

Baird’s book, an old green thing with gold edging, waits for her at the bottom. She picks it up tenderly, knowing that her anger would seem unfounded to anyone else. They just wouldn’t understand. Baird couldn’t possibly understand what it was like to grow up without, to grow up wanting, and for that reason, Sam feels even more angry towards him.

And then she sees the cover. And she reads the title.

The realization hits her like a freight train.

And that realization is all it takes for her to forgive Damon Baird, the roiling anger she feels for him giving way to tender concern, because it always would.

She trudges slowly back up the stairs, gripping the book because she doesn’t have the strength to put it down.

Baird is still at the railing. Holding onto it. Sam sees him in silhouette, and his mask is down again, and she worries that it might stay that way for the rest of his life.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Sam says. “You have to know that.”

She’s using words, but she’s also willing those words to resonate. She _needs_ him to believe her.


	2. Him

“It wasn’t your fault,” Sam says. “You have to know that.”

Baird doesn’t respond because it’s not a matter of fault, not really. And guilt is not reliant on the presence of fault, either way. He feels _guilty_ , that is all. Guilty, and so fucking sad.

“I could’ve done something, Sam.” He looks at her, and then at the useless book still in her hands. _Zoning Ordinance_ , its title reads. _Lesser towns and cities of Tyrus, Vol. 2_. “If I had been there, I might’ve been able to—”

“But you weren’t there, and it’s as simple as that.”

It’s not meant to hurt, but that statement does, and Sam must realize her mistake when Baird turns away from her again. She sidles up next to him.

“Baird,” she mutters. “I promise there’s nothing you could’ve done differently.”

“You don’t know that,” he replies, trying to keep his voice steady and his tone even, because he feels like flying off the handle. He feels like breaking.

“That’s what I do,” he continues, choosing every word as carefully as possible. “We get in trouble, I get us out of it.”

“It was never your job to keep everyone safe,” Sam argues. 

Baird shakes his head. Pushes away from the railing.

His table is still littered with books, but it’s pointless to keep sifting through them. In the end, the layout of the town of Mercy doesn’t matter. Steve is dead anyway, and Baird will never know if he could’ve done something differently to save him. He believes that not knowing will haunt him for the rest of his life.

The weight of that thought settles on his shoulders, and all of a sudden, he’s so tired. More tired than he’s ever been. Grief, he thinks, is like a rock on the shoreline of the ocean. By sleeping, maybe the tide would come in, and there would be some relief. Sleep would be like a tide, covering the rock of grief. But then, that tide would go out as soon as he woke up, and the rock would be visible again; a barnacle-encrusted thing of inarguable reality, a thing which would be there forever, or until God chose to wash it away. 

He catches the tears before they can fall, pressing fingers against his eyes.

Baird’s first memory of death belongs to his grandmother, and her illness, and her funeral. It sticks out in his mind because he’d been forced to wear an uncomfortable black suit to the service, and because it was the only time in his life that he’d ever seen his father cry.

He remembers standing in a pew, studying his grandmother’s waxy corpse as it lay in the open coffin. No one had told him what had killed her, so he was trying to find it himself before they closed the lid; some defect--mole, sore, or blight--that would hint at what to expect in his own old age.

His father’s snuffling caught him off guard, enough of a distraction to peel his eyes off the caskette. And he never forgot what he saw:

His father, a characteristically stoic man in every aspect of life, was hunched over the pew, gripping it as if to stay upright aboard a listing ship. Beside him, Eleanor was stiff, her expression pinched. Baird distinctly remembers his mother not touching his father, and in that moment, he knew that she was ashamed of him. The tears of her husband, an affront on her own dignity.

For his part, Baird felt a little piece of himself die inside that pew--the piece that was allowed to cry, or let anyone see him cry. From that day on, any tears shed in his life would be accompanied by the deepest sense of shame imaginable, and the image of his mother’s hands as he’d seen them on that day: In a position to comfort, but utterly unwilling.

“Hey,” Sam murmurs, and then she’s hugging him, her arms wrapped around his waist, her cheek pressed between his shoulder blades. 

Baird’s first reaction is to break it off, to run, to hide. For years, he’s been trying to convince himself that any feelings harbored for Samantha Byrne are in the negative. In reality, forcing himself to hate her is simply easier. What was it he’d said to Bernie, all those months ago on Vectes?

_Y’know, I was fine when I didn’t care. This is what happens when you make a pet of an animal like me instead of leaving me in the barnyard. You just turn me into something that can feel hurt._

His heart has been broken too many times over the years. He’s only coped by gluing it back together with all the sharp edges pointing outward. He does not want to risk breaking it again.

But he doesn’t want to let Sam go.

He turns before he can stop himself, wrapping his arms around her as tightly as humanly possible, and she reciprocates.

His body feels weightless, suffused with light. He is dimly aware that the feeling has edges; that somewhere beyond it still lies his fragile heart, his only-child solitude, the anxious responsibility he feels for his family, for the world. But this new feeling begs the question; what is the world, anyway? The world begins and ends in the cradle of this body. All the old darknesses seem trivial. Distant and silly, little pencil smudges at the edges of eternity. 

No, he doesn’t want to let her go.


	3. Them

Later, they are lying side by side. At some point in the night, that seemed like the only option for two people exhausted by the world. 

But they are calmer, and they are less afraid. And that’s a start.

Their conversation has ranged from the events of the day to the events of years ago. Secrets have been shared, forging a new bond between Damon Baird and Samantha Byrne that will keep them tethered for the rest of their lives.

Secrets: Baird, and his distinctly lonely predicament of not wanting anyone to grieve over. Sam, pretending that she hates boys while looking for her dead father in their features, trying to put a face to a name, a name to an idea.

It’s been hours, and the lighting in the library--supplied by a single chandelier far overhead--provides something of a candlelit, apocalyptic intimacy. They stare up at it, side by side, and with the plush woolen carpet beneath their heads, it’s easy to imagine that they are somewhere else, somewhere kinder. That they are the first man and the first woman in a universe solely theirs; risking everything, learning each other's limits, figuring everything out from scratch.

Sam turns to look at Baird, and it occurs to her that she’s trading one view of infinity for another.

“What was it like when you were growing up?” she asks. Baird turns so they are face to face, just inches apart. 

“Do you mean Tollen?”

“No,” she says. “I mean everything.”

And it strikes him instantly as the most obvious, possibly even the most important question you could ever ask anyone--How were you formed? What forged you?--but no one has ever asked him that before, and for a second he finds himself flailing in the dark.

_He remembers waiting for the bus and watching other kids. Boys crossing the street with superhero backpacks and chocolate milk on their breath, walking proof of the efforts of unseen mothers. He wanted to talk to them so badly. Or, really, for them to talk to him. He’d seen it happen before, within those precious few minutes between classes or out on the playground. The shared gazes. A smirk offered, a grin reciprocated. He’d watch the exchanges like they were scenes out of nature; two subjects making contact, daring to test the other’s limits, risking death, or worse, rejection. Poking, prodding. And then, the biggest miracle of all: “Hi, my name is...”_

_Friendship. Like it was easy. Like it was possible._

_Next year, he always told himself, still watching from a safe distance. Next year, I’ll make a friend. He swam through grades like that, the promise of companionship dangling in front of him like a carrot on a string, urging him forward. Next year. Next year._

_Next year, as he saw it, was a moth-eaten shirt, nibbled to threads: the shape was right, but the details would always be missing._

_By the time highschool rolled around, he was almost glad to still be on his own. Boys at fifteen disgusted him. They carried a sense of bravado that did not go at all with acne scars and body odor. He was not interested in the obscene and luminous polaroids they secreted away and traded like baseball cards. He did not smoke pot underneath the bleachers._

_College, he told himself, because at some point college had become his next year._

_The fights started at sixteen, when someone decided that a disinterest in girls and drugs spelled Queer. The fights ended in parking lots or bathroom stalls, three to one, four to one. He never learned how to throw a punch without hurting his hand. He never learned how to take a punch without hurting his pride._

_College, he told himself in the aftermath, spitting out blood and losing hope._

_College, he told himself. Where people would notice his absence and exclaim at his return._

“Forget it,” Sam murmurs, when the silence has stretched on for a long minute. She smiles like she understands. She gets up to leave. He stands with her. 

“It’s a big question,” he says, shrugging apologetically. Some secrets won’t be shared for years to come. Confessions will turn out to be currency between them, every divulgence cultivating their own unique brand of intimacy. 

“I understand.”

“It’s not that I don’t want to tell you,” he says.

“I know that,” she says, and then she is kissing him. 

In the end, Damon Baird realizes that he’s been fated for Samantha Byrne since the beginning. In their world, where monster dwelt and loss is guaranteed, love was the only word to use when describing a relationship in which you were ready to die for another human being. And he’d been ready to die for Sam since day one. 

But it is even more than that. He tells himself that he is drowning.

Drowning. What a fucking contradiction. Killed by something you can’t survive without. And yet people flock to great bodies of water. Relax in bathtubs, and play in swimming pools. Why? Because people know better. They can outmaneuver, outsmart, and outlast such indomitable things as rip currents and tidal waves. Because, deep down, they love the feeling they get playing with something dangerous. Knowing that a raging, beautiful thing like that can kill them, it makes them want it even more.

And something of that magnitude, it needs to be experienced in full, all at once. High dives and cannonballs, they were invented with the idea of submergence in mind, hesitation absent and risk of death be damned.

Loving her, it’s a bit like that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, thanks for reading and reviewing! I love hearing from other Baird/Sam stans. :)

**Author's Note:**

> I will never stop loving these two with my whole heart and my whole mind. Reviews make me happy. Thanks for reading!
> 
> (Title referenced from Stay Close, Don't Go, by Secondhand Serenade.)


End file.
